How to beat the hosepipe ban continued

41. Open your grounds to the public but charge the blighters £100 a head to get in.
42. Organize a sporting event on the main lawn at your Mansion but call it off through lack of interest.
43. Set up a car-washing business but charge customers £100 a time.
44. Start a small fire and over-react in spades.

Good luck, mate!

Dave the Leader reckons he’s going to let GCHQ snoop on everyone’s emails, does he? It will be interesting to know how he gets on with my encryption system, which is advertised as: “not so much totally uncrackable as too expensive for any government to crack”. The same sort of idea applies to the proxies used by staff at the Mansion for Internet access.

Balancing Act

You have to wonder at the misapplied ingenuity of politicians. In the spirit of “we’re all in it together”, the chancellor has decided to bung more VAT on cold champagne served in restaurants and other public places (but not the Palace of Westminster thanks to generous subsidies from the taxpayer), and he thinks that will repair the damage done by putting VAT on hot pies & pasties. What a plonker!

Beating a drought

It would appear that you can’t use a hose- or other pipe to fill a swimming pool without facing a huge fine, but you can use a tap and a bucket. But filling up a fish pond with a hosepipe is okay. So the answer to the problem seems to be to put a couple of fish in the swimming pool and say it’s a fish pond with lots of elbow room, to which humans have access. Simple!

Give him an “E” for Enterprise

The proprietor of the local village bakery has suggested to me that I might care to buy a modest microwave oven and leave it in his shop for the benefit of customers who want hot pies, rolls, pastries, etc. He’s worried that the 20% VAT slapped on Hot Food in the Budget will affect his sales, and he expects that he will have to leave almost everything fresh-from-the-oven to cool because his customers won’t pay the unnecessary tax. Admiring the cheek of the fellow, I’m inclined to go along with his notion!

A whole lotta nuthin'

I was just thinking, why would anyone give £250K to the Tories? You got a peerage for your money under New Labour. But dinner with Dave? That sounds like a job for a psychiatrist for anyone who thinks that's value for money.

What have I been doing other than not blogging?

Well, one activity which has featured very prominently in the last fortnight is my Things Campaign. Given that the government is run to a disproportionate degree by Liberals, who are very liberal with everyone else’s money but their own, I’ve been converting my assets into Things, which can be dropped off the radar conveniently so that whatever profit or loss I take on them should I ever need to convert them to cash will be my business and mine alone. I reckon I’m providing more than enough cash to the economy through existing taxes, not to mention all the employment I’ve created, that I am entitled to make myself Liberal-proof. And the beauty of it is that, if done well enough, there’s not a damn thing the Liberal millionaires like Clegg and Huhne can do about it.